Why do Scottish love wearing kilts??

For the draft!!! It is NBA Draft night - Woo hoo!! There's a reason I haven't mentioned basketball here since the 2nd round of the playoffs - the way the Suns got screwed, and the Spurs' methodical death march towards the championship was allowed to continue...just ripped my heart out. Also it was completely uninteresting watching Cleveland get embarrassed.

But this draft, in many ways deeper and more interesting than even 2003 (which produced Lebron/Melo/Wade), makes me super excited for next year's season, the beginning of the Portland renaissance, and seeing if KG and Kobe can find themselves given a second life on new teams. More thoughts after the draft; I need to get the grill going.

iPhoning It In

This is my comment on the iphone review over at the nytimes. I'm posting it here because only after I bothered writing it did I realize that there's no way nytimes will approve it; the only comments that get posted are along the lines of "Hello, I am a businessman cog in the machine, and, as such, I am a humourless dickfuck. The creamy Steve-Jobs-Semen-White colour on Apple's devices pleases me, and briefly distracts me from how meaningless my life is". And all of my crappily written diatribes while being bored at work simply MUST be acknowledged!


I'm sorry, but the iPhone is a very, very, very bad deal. Apple is merely a genius at marketing. The iPod has consistently been badly outclassed in terms of features, audio quality, battery life, *and* price (often all at once), and yet its marketing and hipness installs a belief even in many tech reviewers (especially the tech reviewers for more popular sites) that it is the "standard" for a device. But if quantity were synonymous with quality, wouldn't AO Scott be out of a job?

As far as phones go, I don't really need anything except a quality, compact, cell phone. Which is free with one-year phone plans from companies that *aren't* the worst service providers in the country (as AT&T is consistently rated). Oh, and when you lose one of those phones, a replacement is either free with insurance, or like a hundred bucks.

So what are people really wanting the iPhone for? Apple suggests that we need to watch Youtube videos on it (neglecting to mention that since it doesn't support flash or other web video protocols, the majority of internet video is inaccessable. Oops!). But how often will you really be doing that? If you absolutely need a mobile device for emails, there are LOTS of options for $200-300 that have nice actual keypads, instead of awkward touch-typing setups. If Apple hadn't felt the need to bundle the phone in (to get the big AT&T contract), then it actually might be a somewhat cost-competitive device, if you wanted a mobile OS X machine. But who cares about the specifics - everyone is buying it for hype. Be honest with yourself: if this same exact product was being released by another company, would you want to buy it as much?? To save yourself the wait in line, you can just get a big Apple tattoo on your forehead and mail Apple a $600 check. It is more or less the same effect.

Edit: Oh, I guess they did post it. Ah well.

Album du jour #21 - Sticks and Stones

Ok, so I've decided to revive the ADJ thing, but in a different way. Before I was trying to give people a a feel for the weirdness of my music tastes by pulling up a random sampling, and also to force myself to pay attention to music that has been languishing on my hard drive, appreciated less than fully.

But I have increasingly gotten into checking out different types of music, so I didn't feel the need - and I couldn't come up with a damn thing worth saying about Air's latest album, for instance. Only the music I hated was fun to write about, and that wasn't fun to listen to.

So I'm going to shift from helping myself out by subjecting myself to different music, to helping everyone else out by talking about albums that I feel are tragically unknown; championing the subaltern, that is me! Besides, some people I had never heard of decided that my site was worth linking to, but only the music part of it.

Mocky - Navy Brown Blues (2006)

Allow me to quote Wikipedia's lines describing the twisted and sordid tale of Mocky's heritage:
"Mocky is a pop music perfomer (born Dominic Salole) in Saskatchewan who later moved to Ottawa and then Toronto, Canada. He later moved to Berlin, Germany. His father is of Somali descent but born in present-day Yemen, his mother is from England."

From a background like that, what kind of music would you expect him to make? Neo-funk/soul, obviously! But the word "funk" is so inexorably entangled with 70s cultural markers that it is hard to think about what it might just be. There are some bands that are doing funk that is very retro in style but very quality - Soullive comes to mind (I ran into a guy who played some gigs with them the other night). Mocky adds a whole new dimension to funk, however, which is why he was the perfect figure to work on Jamie Lidell's breathtaking Multiply, and to help fuse Lidell's techno inclinations with the strangely soulful potential in his voice.



Navy Brown Blues is not quite on the same level as Multiply - which I think was one of the 10 best albums in 2005 - but it is more accessable and uplifting. The best tracks are the opening "Tears of Joy", and those on which he has collaborators: Fightin' Away the Tears (w/ Feist), In the Meantime (w/ Jamie Lidell), and Elementary (w/ Taylor Savvy). Nothing really drags, except maybe the title track. This is just one of those albums that I can't imagine anyone really disliking, unless they abjectly refuse to listen to anything that doesn't sound like "white people music" (ironic given the ethnicity of those involved). On the converse, I'm very suspicious of any band that features that makes any reference to the arctic or antarctic in its name or song titles. This includes all polar phenomenon - the auroras, etc.


In any case, I am extremely excited by this strange convergence of Canadian artists interested in electronica/soul/funk, and I hope that the Lidell/Feist/Mocky work produces many more wonderful albums...maybe under the moniker The New Funkographers. That's kind of funny.

Speaking of things that people need to watch/listen to more, if you have HBO, then do yourself a damn favour and WATCH THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS. It is such an amazingly funny show. Basically it is about a band of two guys from New Zealand who live together in New York, and it might be the first show to really attempt the half show/half musical thing since Cop Rock. Except, this is about musicians so it makes sense, and it is fucking hilarious, so it is enjoyable. I tried to compel my roommates to watch the second episode when it aired on Sunday, but re-runs of cartoons were more pressing, apparently. It pains me the things that get watched on my poor second TV upstairs....

Randomness:

The new shorts that I'm wearing today have two beverage coasters in them. Why are there coasters in my pockets?!? I don't get this. Oh, and the coasters have recipes for tropical mixed drinks on them too.

The fortune cookie I got from lunch reads: "Life is like a dogsled team. If you aren't the lead dog, the scenery never changes." Which is definitely my favourite fortune cookie about staring at asses since the "Stare at ass - learn chinese, good bye" one I got four years ago.

I lost my only pair of glasses on the way to work today! That's great.

Illegal Craigslist Postings

Apparently it is illegal to post a housing ad that describes your home as being in a "nice, quiet, mature, neighborhood" (because that discriminates against people with children).

I'm going to edit the CL housing post that we currently have up to specify "NO BELLY FRUIT". I'll be the Thoreau of my generation!!!!

Michael Cera Sexppreciation Day

If you know me very well at all, then you'll know that I think Arrested Development is the greatest band sitcom ever made. It reaches a level of comedy so far advanced beyond any other (and yes, I do think that there is a sense of "advancement" in comedic stylings, which is precisely why 30 year old sitcoms are not really funny anymore), that it along with the Simpsons has inspired a great deal of my thoughts on the essence of humour.

But rather than spend pages and pages attempting to virtually sexually gratify a canceled TV show, I want to focus on one member of that brilliant ensemble: Michael Cera. While Jason Bateman has biggest history, Will Arnett played the goofiest character, and David Cross is not only my favourite stand-up comedian but also responsible for the greatest sketch comedy show ever, I think that we may look back and think that the brightest star belongs to Cera. A suspicion I've had ever since the very first time airing of the first episode of the show, in which the first lines (chronologically) were:

Michael: What do we always say is the most important thing?
George Michael (Cera's character): Breakfast.
Michael: No, family.
G-M: Oh right. I thought you meant out of the things you eat.

For all of those people who thought that Arrested Development's failings rating-wise were due to the fact that it was HIGHLY complex and self-referential (the show's jokes constitute a dizzying set of circles within circles within spirals within rhombuses...while Seinfeld's last scene mirrors its first one, basically every scene in AD was packed with references to another)...that is patently untrue. This opening bit of dialogue, with the perfect way in which it was performed, instantly showed how hilarious the show really was. Those 4 lines were all one needed to recognize that fact. Failure to get the show is just a defect, pure and simple...and maddeningly enough one that the vast majority of Americans suffer from!

But no need to lament, because despite its early demise, AD showed us all the light, and Michael Cera is one of the shiniest fucking bulbs around. While I instantly had a crush on Alia Shakwat (who plays Maebe, pictured above), she is (still) underage, which made that crush technically wrong. However, she and George Michael come to fall for each other, and they're cousins - that redemption of incest makes my virtua-crush ok. And it also legitimizes my desire for Michael Cera, which is strange, because I'm not even gay. But I'll still fuck the daylights out of him as an means of honoring and submitting to his glory if I ever get the chance! It is a matter of duty.
Which would make me Katherine Hairgel (or whatever the fuck her name is, being from Grey's Anatomy, she doesn't deserve my bothering to learn what it really is) in this following send-up of the craziness that went down on the I Heart Huckabees set:

Michael Cera gets fired from Knocked Up
Uploaded by TstarV

This shows just how well set up Michael Cera is for the future. Getting in on the Judd Apatow money train means that he's set for life. Of course he has so much talent he doesn't need that, but it is exciting to know that he is an heir-apparent in Apatow's comedy money juggernaut. His first movie produced by Apatow is Superbad, which seems like one of the best upcoming movies this year. And there's another Apatow/Cera movie in the works

And there's also the web episodes of Clark and Michael.

So in a few years from now when your lungs and loins have exploded from seeing too much Cera hilarity and sexiness all over the place...don't say I didn't warn you.

Random sidenote: Don't search google images for "Laura Schlessinger" (Dr Laura)!! Unless you're not at work and want to contribute to her humiliation. I stumbled across this as a total accident when doing some research for a comment I left on this person's website, which I found when trying to figure out the commands for using strike through, which was necessary to make my lame/overused Arrested Development band/show joke above. It is funny where the internet takes you....

Crap Boobs Crap....Hell Damn Fart

One of my favourite things that they do over at the AVClub.com (I am constantly astounded about how many people don't go to that site everyday. I have long ago forgotten that the regular Onion exists, except when Jon Burmeister sends me links to 3 year old Onion articles) is the Crosstalk feature, where two of their head writers engage in a really deep and thorough discussion on an interesting subject. The one they posted today is on the role of the MPAA, and whether its standards in determining whether a movie is R or NC17. This isn't the part that I'm particularly interested in - although I disagree with Noel Murray's devil's advocate position (albeit an interesting one) that the MPAA is actually the best possible system despite its Christian Conservative slant (aka, homophobic, and hypocritically fine with extreme violence while blanching at healthy depictions of sexuality).

The remark that seemed interesting to me was when Noel defended the attempt to prevent children from hearing swearing. He admits that kids are going to hear swearing at an early age anyways; but his position is that we need swear words to have a greater impact, and the only way they can have any meaning as swear words is if there is an attempt at a taboo in place to give them that added perk. In essence, he is employing Foucaultian logic here - that the strength of something rises in response to the organized taboo against it - and saying that is good to allow the words "fuck" and "shit" to keep their vitality.


I have always thought that if I were to have a child (however unlikely that may be), I wouldn't try and restrict it from learning swear words. If my hypothetical child asked me "what does fuck mean, I heard it somewhere" I would likely respond "it is something some people say when they are extremely frustrated or angry...don't say it in public or at school or you'll get in trouble because many people find the word offensive or disgusting to hear." Of course, then I would be guilty of treating my child as if it were an adult, and while part of me thinks that is the healthiest way to raise a kid, I am not totally certain.

But even if that is a healthy way to raise a child - not struggling with taboos, and thus developing a more genuine relationship to words unaffected by arbitrary restrictions - would that lead to a world in which swear words no longer have any meaning? Or more artistic and creative means to add emphasis and flavour into words?

faseptic

There's only one skeleton that I want to punch more than Hitler, and that is Sarah Jessica Parker.



She is so unbelievably disgusting. Even if her face didn't look like a huge foot, her mere existence is a blight on the world we live in.

Ack!! That sight is giving me hives...throat closing up....need antidote or will die.....



AAAHHhhhhhhh. Much better.

Invention is the Daughter of Grogginess

The Brian that exists in the foothills between sleep and within just 120 seconds or so of the alarm going off - that guy is the laziest fucking guy this world has ever seen.

I have a real problem with keeping a normal schedule. I am just so accustomed to going to sleep around 2 or so, and waking up around 10 or so (or later on weekends), that my inability to wake up at the sound of the alarm clock is absurdly high. I tried to solve this problem by getting a super loud alarm clock. In fact, one that has a connected thing that you slip under your mattress, that pulsates and actually shakes you awake. But to the person I am just moments after I wake up, absolutely anything is justifiable. There are no moral codes, no motivating reasons to possibly leave the bed. I was late to work every single day last week. It is pathetic. Even though my alarm is really loud and shakes everything, and even though I have my phone alarm as the backup, I can still turn both of those off virtually in my sleep, and not even remember afterwards having done so.

Today I actually got up early, and was even able to eat breakfast(!) while watching some HBO on demand before showering and getting to work...due to having to get up early to help move a car. But when there aren't extenuating circumstances, how can I manage to get up?

What I really need is a kind of alarm clock that forces me to be awake for a few minutes; at which point my superego kicks into gear and tells myself "no, don't go back to bed, start moving around." I don't think such a thing exists, so I have hit upon an invention: an alarm clock that requires you to solve some kind of puzzle before you can turn it off. Even something just like simple math problems...if you had to calculate what 104 divided by 6 was before the beeping would stop, for example. You would have to get your brain into working order, no getting around it. I'd market this idea, but I don't know if there enough people out there like me whose ability to perform basic tasks was so compromised that they needed wacky gadgets to get up in the morning.

Bpork

In case there's anyone amongst you who doesn't share my Bjork-fetish....this video is to educate you. This video is actually pretty close to my vision of what heaven would look like. Except that I'd be the one playing the dope-as-shit ReacTable (the wacky synth instrument with space-agey blocks that she's been touring with). If a weird perverted genie popped up and offered to let me sleep with just one person in the whole wide world, I'd pick Bjork in a heartbeat. This isn't some obscure person who I'm bringing to your attention, doing everyone a service by getting word out there. Nope, but damn it, I just love Bjork. And saying Bjork. Bjork Bjork Bjork.






Why is Paul McCartney just hanging out on stage, nodding in approval? Why is he there? This fascinates me.

When the Fat Italian Sings

When I talked about favourite TV shows a month ago, I mentioned how the Sopranos had kind of fallen out of my radar due to the long period of time that had elapsed since it had really been current. The first half of season 6 was really strange (half of it in a weird-coma fantasy about Tony living an alternative life that ends up mirroring hell), and since I had watched the first four seasons in one running sprint back in 2003, I really hadn't felt any connection to the show in a long time.

Then I watched the last 5 episodes in the days leading up to the finale, and the finale itself. The internet exploded when the show ended in a tense scene with the family in a diner, with Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" playing, making it appear as if Tony was likely to be shot by any number of suspicious characters...when there was an abrupt fade to black. Huge controversy raged over whether this represents the viewers experiencing Tony's death (even though the elements wanting to kill him had already been eliminated), whether it was some kind of huge cop-out by creator David Chase. A wide swath of people interpret the peculiar ending as the ultimate expression of his disdain for the audience and their desire to see a more traditional/dramatic wrap-up of an ending. But it really raised my appreciation for what DC was trying to do with the show.

I think there are obviously myriad ways in which the show is meant to be a catalyst through which one gains appreciation for the essence of humanity in this day and age; what it means to anticipate death, the crumbling of tradition and need for arbitrary draconian order to be imposed in its place, the relationship to fiction and what and why we expect certain things.

But most of all I think it cemented the way in which this show better than anything else captures the contemporary American mood. The Wire is in some ways more astounding - because it almost transcends the label of "fiction" - but sometimes one has to go beyond the looking glass a little in order to hit home. All of the weird prophetic dreams and visions that Tony has throughout the course of the show - aren't stuck in there so as to advance the plot, but instead establish the way in which we know our own path but keep our eyes firmly fixed either behind or directly ahead of us.

The parallels meant between the family and what the majority considers the "ideal" of American family life became much starker at the conclusion. Every commentator has picked up on the remarkable way in which the characters don't change their essential nature; the entire enterprise of "personal growth" as it is considered today was symbolized by the therapy which ultimately revealed itself to be a means of perpetuating one's ability to live with things, not a means for any kind of real change. Spinning in circles and revolutions might be the same thing if you're speaking mathematically, but not humanly. And the need for that self-justification, the veneer of fake self-investigation, is something we absolutely crave in order to keep the part of our minds open to genius and realization at arms length. To prevent our better judgments from seizing control of us, we will resort to extreme measures to avoid the coup. The concept of resistance is so tainted now by the ultimate disdain we have for any kind of social movements; pale shadows of the 60s and 70s when new meaning was still possible. Changes of government, changes of mob rule; these shiftings of strategic positioning that distract us from the glaring need for self-reinvention. That is the area in which we have stalled, that is what keeps the ketchup jammed in the Heinz bottle, and we all know it! That is why everything else happens so much faster and tastes so much like ashes on our lips. We try to run from our one need, and the constant inability to do so reveals that need as to a greater degree....which prompts us to run harder. Everyone faces a choice between apocalypse and leaping across a chasm; the leap is inevitable, we just can't decide if we should be the ones to make it, our let ourselves be pushed.

In 1989 with the end of the USSR at hand, a guy named Francis Fukuyama wrote an article called "The End of History and the Last Man." This argument was that the mass changes in government and economic states that had formed the horizons of history were at an end, and liberal democracies mostly dominated by capitalist markets were the inevitable and universal model for all countries that would follow.

I won't go into much of what I think about this position (it is a strangely Marxian response to the death of Marxism, in that it is also a very bad reading of Hegel's Master/Slave dynamic), but it is a huge part of the American psyche. The real emotional impact of 9/11 was not the body count involved, but the fact that these brown backwards people had the audacity to challenge the narrative that American values had clearly won. The Russians were a peculiar blend of other and sameness to the point where our concerns were competing over the same things; number of satelites, number of nuclear weapons, etc. They had the same end goal, just a different means of going about it; so it felt more like a race to see who could get to that goal the soonest. The new "terrorist" threats don't even have the same end-game, which is absurd. EVERYONE should want to be like us and buy our products.

Fans wanted and expected the show to end crystallized around a massive opposition of Tony vs. an other - the New York crew, or the FBI, or even that Russian mobster who escaped a hit seasons ago and people kept wondering when he would be brought back (David Chase loved to play with the audience, even going so far as to have in the teaser for the final season a shot of the forest he escaped in with the words "revenge is a dish best served cold", which was a genius). They wanted a storyline around which they could define Tony as a clear protagonist. Instead the final episodes had him kill his nephew/heir apparent figure mainly because he was pathetic, coerce his depressive son into the mafia world, see his daughter revolve back into it of her own accord...he used his power and influence to avoid change as long as he could; and people around him were either forced into the same stagnation or ended up dead. It is also no accident that while Martin Scorsese looks to New York to capture a slice of the American dream, David Chase points the cameras at the suburbs just next to New York to showcase the ugly reality. Both Tony Soprano and America are joined at the hip on one issue: when confronted with challenges to the nostalgic script we want life to adapt to, rather than rethink their dreams, both choose death.

Not to get all cheesy or anything, but I'm strongly reminded of the home/otherness/voyage dynamic that shows up in Holderlin's poem "Andenken" that Heidegger makes such a big fuss of:
Many are afraid to go to the source,
since treasure is first found in the sea.
Like painters, they gather up earth's beauty,
and they don't scorn winged war,
or to live alone for years
beneath the bare mast —
where the city's festivities
don't flash through the night, or
the sound of strings and native dancing.

But now the men
have left for India...
from the windy peaks
and vine-covered hills
where the Dardogne
comes down with the great
Garonne; wide as an ocean
the river flows outward.
But the sea takes
and gives memory,
and love fixes the eye diligently,
and poets establish
that which endures.

Hitchhiking on the Information Super Highway

This the weirdest thing ever: the US Military looked into (but did not fund the acquisition of) developing non-lethal weapons intended to spread hormones in enemy soldiers so intense that they would stop fighting and start fucking each other. I'm not surprised that the government wastes money in a homophobic fashion, since there are so many instances of it wasting money on military crap and also of being homophobic, so the combination isn't a shocker. But what seems beyond naive is the notion that hormones of such a level could exist. If there were hormones that would instantly cause you to want to fuck the person next to you regardless of gender or how you feel about them....don't you think the millions of perverts in this country would have come up with it already? Given the extent to which there is a will out there, they would have found a way. If North Korea was intending to take out San Fernando valley with an ICBM, porn enthusiasts would have had a working National Missile Defense shield up in the blink of an eye. This is just another instance of proof that every high level governmental organization needs an official post for "Vice President of Common Sense" who can veto stupid shit. If this city would have had one of those, it wouldn't have spent millions trying to contain the threat of a bunch of flashing Mooninites signs. We wouldn't have attacked a different country than the one housing the people who attacked us, and pizzas would be bigger. And so on.


A few other things I stumbled across:

The White Stripes are releasing upcoming album Icky Thump on USB drives that are built to look like Jack and Meg!! Weird.


You know how it is kind of hard with Etch-a-Sketch to draw a straight line? Well, for it me it is, anyway. Look at this guy who drew a realistic picture of Lebron James with one. Astounding the different media artists can work in.

Just when I think there's no hope for the Japanese...

...they go and redeem themselves.

Waking Li(fe)brary

A strange set of dreams I've had this weekend. I blame my 26th birthday (which was Friday). Mainly because my sleeping schedule has been resultingly messed up, and I tend to only remember dreams when I'm sleeping long past what my waking time ought to be. Or maybe it is because the arbitrary aligning of this calender date with the day of my birth has made me reflective or something. In any case, an interesting collection of dream imagery I thought was worth sharing:

Saturday - A work dream. I have something like my current job, in a strange and confusing factory/airport/giant machine of a building. I must help keep various things running in this huge gray monstrosity, but I don't understand most of it. I pass by Denice's office (she has a good office for some reason); she has an important connection to the higher ups for someone so young. Her job involves compassion somehow, but ultimately serves the interest in keeping the planes running on time. And there are lots of planes, departure schedules everywhere.

I get a call - someone has a problem with the computer. It says something about the domain not being found - "simple problem," I say. "Just activate your computer on the network". The voice on the other end informs me that he can't do that. Mystified, I set out to see for myself.

Change in scenery - now I'm somewhere near a large academic building, or hospital, or something, that I feel is out in the wilderness but near a larger urban area. Kind of reminds me of Canby's high school, or something like that. It is late evening. I go to the office in question, and the guy who called is a wiry, rat like man with dark hair who seems flummoxed with the computer's problem. it turns out it is an ancient computer, a model "80609" or something like that (a vague and inaccurate reference to some of the chip names that were around in the late 80s/early 90s). The computer is a dusky box with a screen. "It has never booted up" the guy says, and I turn it on, and it boots up. He celebrates because now he can do his work. This whole scene smacks of familiarity, and there is a hint of memory about something afterwards on the grass at night....I have a strong feeling that a lot of these scenes are from recurring dreams.

Very drastic change (I perceive this as being right after, but I could have woken up inbetween, or forgotten stuff, because it has a different temporal feeling, even if my mind says it comes chronogically next). I am now driving with someone who is kind of a mixture of Walter and Clint, to a building where they work or go to school or something. they have to run an errand, and I go in with. The building looks like a boring newish business building that you'd see in Beaverton, but it is actually a gigantic religious library that is in the shape of a winding tower. Lots of people are everywhere, there is some sort of educational camp here. One of the camp "leaders" is a very very short girl, who seems to beckon me on. On one of the book shelves I find a legal notepad or ledger or something that has the near future written on it (I don't remember actually reading this; either I skimmed it or I just knew these things after getting the notepad). The notepad had written in story form what was about to unfold. The short girl would invite me to a higher level, I would fall for another, and in order to try and have both I would come onto the short girl while pretending to be distant towards the other girl with smoky eyes, and then I would have both.

I'm not sure if the notepad's contents will actually come to pass, but I try to follow what it says just in case. I walk upstairs, lean against the large railing (a large wide open space in the middle of the tower/monestary/library), acting casual. The red headed girl with smoky eyes is seated at a table reading with some others, and looks my way, but I have to pretend to pretend to be casual. We chat some, but I intentionally ignore her to pursue the short, chirpy girl. The smoky eyed girl ends up following, and I'm led to a room at the very top of the tower that is decked out in church and christian icons, with a large, pink bed in the middle. And that's when I wake up. (I almost always wake up right before sex happens in any dream).

The next night, I have some dreams that seem related to the previous nights'. I start traveling to a place that I KNOW that has been in recurring dreams of mine before from the past few weeks. This place is supposedly Allston, but I have to take a weird bus and go out of my usual way to get there. In the previous week's dream it took an hour to reach this place, it was an out of the way ballroom, like attached to a mason hall or something, where people would dance.

In last night's dream I was headed to the same place, and it was the same organization, but now they are in a library...not like the library from the previous night's dream, but flatter, more of a dark, wider space that only has one floor above me (kind of like a mix between a Costco and the Lewis and Clark college library, actually). A man in a wheelchair comes in to a room where I had been standing with books, and accuses me of allowing something bad to come to pass. I was reading a book by an old german philosopher (Heidegger? I don't know if that is explicitly the case, or just what I was thinking of), who once sexually stalked a woman. And by my reading of his book, the wheelchair bound man (in his 50s) accused me of being complicit in this crime. I was taken before the leader or head guy in this library, who was younger, 35 or so, and dark haired. He seemed sympathetic to my claims that I had done nothing wrong, but the wheelchair guy was physically trying to pull me back and away from the head guy to stop my pleading. I thought of this place as a place that I would constantly go to, and also that place I visited to take dance classes with my female friend (that was the extent of the dream from last week that I remember, and I was referencing that to myself in the dream).

Kind of interesting stuff. Maybe just to me, I don't know...but it is so rare that I remember my dreams, I like to try and develop accounts of them that are as full as possible.

Oregon Country Fair - Nudity + Vanity + Awkwardness - Country

While I typically hate stealing things directly from other sources, I feel the need to rip off The Hater here and point out the ridiculous 21 covers for the upcoming Bono-edited edition of Vanity Fair.

Basically they took 20 random celebrities, ranging from Bush, to Chris Rock, to Oprah...and each cover features one of them whispering some fact about Africa while the other person stares pensively at the viewer. The photography is a mixture of banality, insanity, hilarity, and...I don't know. But you have to look through them for yourself:

Muhammed Ali hanging out with Queen Rania!
Bono admiring the cut of Condoleezza Rice's suit!
Bush admitting to Desmond Tutu that evolution is correct!
Madonna giving Maya Angelou crabs!
The weird smore-threesome with Oprah inbetween Bill and Melinda Gates!

And while I'm finding things online and passing them off here in lieu of original content, there's a New York Times article that is worth a read about the long-term effects that entering public schooling sooner or later has upon kids. I'm always somewhat interested in education, although the statistic number-crunching that goes on in this education building that I work in has little to do with the improvement of a person, I suspect...but then maybe my greek definition of education (see my new blog headline!) would actually jive very well with the statistical software packages I spend my day installing, since the greeks loved numbers so. In any case, I was always younger than most everyone else in my class, and I was a total outsider...I know that if I were more on people's levels socially throughout elementary and middle school, I would not have focused my attention inwards and on books about science and whatnot. So it interests me, what types of things one ought to be learning at what age. Even more so, is whether or not comfort and stability really are the best path to self-improvement. If I was comfortable and stable in elementary school, would I have gone in a direction of wanting to be at the top? My desire for intellect was in many ways a desire for revenge. I would not have become a debater, and then backasswardly fallen into philosophy, that is for certain. In fact, I likely would be a musician right now if I weren't so interested in participating only in things that I can really be superior to all others at (a large part of why it is tough to get me to cook, for instance...I'll never get the thrill of a tiny little mental sneer as the result of my labours there).

O Coen Brothers, Where Art Thou?

I apologize for my long silence. All my fingers were chopped off in a croquet accident this weekend and I had to wait for them to grow back. Or something. Also, I actually did write a long post, but it can't go up until Thursday for a very good reason.

There's another "long term blog project" that I've been working on - no, it isn't figuring out how to make the damn thing look decent. I am writing a post where I attempt to rank the top 50 Simpsons episodes. This is mainly just an excuse to make myself re-watch every Simpsons episode from seasons 2-10. In Season 4's "Brother From the Same Planet," Milhouse and his some other kids are planning to sneak into an R rated movie...

Milhouse: It's called Barton Fink!!


This is one of the better Milhouse episodes altogether (coupled with the "trab pu kcip!" bit later), but I haven't completed my ranking yet, so I'm not sure if it ends up in the top 50. Meanwhile, watching it did remind me that long ago I intended to see Barton Fink, but never got around to it. This quickly led to me looking up what the Coen Brothers are doing in the future - they've got some fantastic things coming out.

No Country for Old Men just showed at Cannes, and I like the reviews of it - if it is similar in tone to Blood Simple, then I'll be an excited man. Simple was the first Coen movie, which I saw in film class years back...huge fan of it, despite them not having developed their style yet (nor having yet discovered their "Steve Muse-chemi".


Burn After Reading....look at that cast! And we don't know anything yet about Serious Man or Hail Caesar...but I'm interested. Meanwhile, I just netflixed every Coen Bros film that I haven't seen yet - Barton Fink and Ladykillers.

I don't talk about movies much...largely because in general they mean less to me than music and TV shows, strangely. The way in which audio impacts me more strongly should be obvious from things I've said, and television speaks more to my collector's impulse...to either follow characters or a continuing grand narrative arc, to see every episode of a show I've decided to follow. Movies are just there...and I know a lot of people for whom the uniqueness of their experience makes them all the more cinephiles. But for me it just means that I don't feel like anything is missing if I don't go to the theatre to see the newest release. There's certainly a lot of movies that I'm very glad I have watched, but I don't have an itch that needs scratching if I don't. But remembering Fargo and Big Lebowski and Blood Simple and Hudsucker Proxy...I have an itch now.

Here's what music I've been listening to lately:

- Cee-lo Green Is The Soul Machine: To say I'm a Cee-lo fan would be an understatement. Especially after that turn on the Brak Show....The Art of Noise with Pharrell is an amazingly uplifting song, with more legs than anything off of Gnarles Barkley's debut album (although I fervently hope that he and Dangermouse keeps it going).

- Tio Bitar by Dungen. New release, Swedish psych/prog-rock. Listen to the song "Familj" on the avclub's review

- Mirrored by Battles. Crazy shit. I don't know how to describe it, read pitchfork.

Speaking of which, they have a new song available to download from the New Pornographer's upcoming album. I am not entranced by the song as I am most of their stuff, but I have a lot of faith in them, so we'll see.